Living Canon

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey is a novelist whose work pulses with the rhythms of the Caribbean, blending magical realism, history, and sensual prose to create narratives that challenge conventional storytelling. Her fiction often explores themes of identity, displacement, and desire, drawing on her own background and keen observations of Caribbean culture and diaspora. Her characters are frequently caught between worlds—between sea and land, past and present, the mythical and the mundane—and it’s in these liminal spaces that Roffey’s most compelling narratives unfold.

Roffey’s 2020 Costa Book Award for The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story marked a significant recognition of her distinctive voice and ambitious literary vision. The novel, which reimagines the mermaid myth through a Caribbean lens, showcases her ability to weave folklore and contemporary consciousness into a tender, darkly imaginative love story that spans decades. The Costa recognition placed her among the year’s most celebrated writers and underscored what longtime readers of her work already knew: that Roffey brings rare emotional intelligence and lyrical depth to her exploration of desire, transformation, and what it means to belong.